This article examines the activism of Tunisian university students in the late 1960s. During the series of events surrounding the student protests of March 1968 at the University of Tunis, political activists across Tunisia and France forged communication networks or drew upon existing ones in order to further their political claims. The objectives of this article are to investigate the historical roots of these transnational networks in the colonial and postcolonial periods as well as to integrate Tunisia within the “global 1968.” Through an analysis of student protests and government reactions, I argue that ties with the former metropole shaped students’ demands and that a strictly national perspective of events is insufficient. In response to state repression, Tunisian activists shifted their struggle from global anti-imperialism toward the expansion of human rights on the national level. The networks proliferated over the course of 1968 and beyond as concrete realities shaped the direction of new claims.

Studies of Middle Eastern urbanism have traditionally been guided by a limited repertoire of tropes, many of which emphasize antiquity, confinement, and religiosity. Notions of the old city, the walled city, the casbah, the native quarter, and the medina, sometimes subsumed in the quintessential “Islamic city,” have all been part of Western scholarship's long-standing fascination with the region. Etched in emblematic “holy cities” like Jerusalem, Mecca, or Najaf, Middle Eastern urban space is heavily associated with the “sacred,” complete with mystical visions and assumptions of violent eschatologies and redemption.

A glance at a map shows what an important role the sea played in the vast empire of the Ottomans in the 18th century, linking as it did the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa that made up the Old World. The Ottoman Empire dominated not only the eastern Mediterranean but also the major part of the southern shore of the western Mediterranean, the Black Sea—a “Turkish lake” until the 1780s—the Red Sea, and part of the Arab/Persian Gulf.Geography gave the sea a decisive role in the trade that took place in the Ottoman Empire both internationally and domestically.

Marx, the prophet of revolution, may no longer haunt conservative politicians, but Marx, the theorist of revolution, continues to both attract and arouse social scientists. In the words of one student of politics, the social sciences, especially political sociology, can be described as a ‘century-long dialogue with Karl Marx.’ And as one prominent historian of ideas has aptly stated, Marx can properly be called the midwife of twentieth-century social thought, ‘for in the process of discarding what they had found invalid in Marxism and explaining what aspects of it had proved helpful, the innovators of the late nineteenth century took their first steps towards constructing a more general theory of social reality.’ For example, Emile Durkheim developed the paradigm of ‘mechanical and organic solidarity’ to counter the theory of class struggle. Vilfred Pareto and Gaetano Mosca stressed the dichotomy between ruling elites and ruled masses to supplant the concept of socioeconomic classes. Robert Michels formulated the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ to warn that popular organizations, such as the Social Democratic Parties, would bring in not the era of democratic socialism but the autocracy of bureaucratic socialists.’ And Max Weber, of course, devoted much of his career to showing that the dynamics of class conflict should be studied concomitantly with the heavy weights of conservative ideologies, traditional religions, ethnic castes, and bureaucratic institutions.

This article examines the role gender plays in the pilgrimage rites in Mecca at the turn of this century. I argue, as a student of local cultures rather than a scholar of universalistic Islamic beliefs, that portions of the hajj at that time had a special significance for Arab Muslims in and near the Hijaz. Arab pilgrims served, ad dressed, and even dressed the Kaʿba like a bride. By ascribing feminine charac teristics to the Kaʿba, they temporarily transformed human gender roles and constructed an alternative model of gender that could be utilized when negotiating and renegotiating gender roles in everyday life.

My aim here is to revise a common view of the development of Sufi organizations and practices. Sufis have generally been contrasted with the ulema to suggest that Sufism and law were incompatible and even hostile to each other: the elaboration and guardianship of Islamic law (fiqh) was the concern of the ulema; the inner, experiential dimension of Islam the concern of Sufis. In their quest for knowledge of God (maʿrifa) Sufis often bypassed and at times even flouted the shariʿa, until reconciliation between law and Sufism became necessary and was effected by Ghazzali in the 11th century. This supposed reconciliation allowed the spread of Sufism and the development of Sufi institutions, including in the late 12th and 13th centuries the Sufi brotherhoods (ṭarīqas). Until then, Sufis had formed loose circles or groups that had no institutional structure or affiliation. In the 12th and 13th centuries, these groups crystallized and autonomous Sufi institutions and practices emerged. The Sufi brotherhoods spread Sufism until it became part of Muslim social and devotional life.

The issue of woman's proper role in society is a lively one in any country today, East or West. Perhaps in no other area has the rapidity of social and economic change touched the lives and values of the average person so deeply. In the Middle East this topic is particularly sensitive because one of the most frequent criticisms leveled at Islam by Western observers is that it degrades women. Male guardianship of women, forced marriages, polygamy, the seclusion of women, and the man's unilateral right of divorce are all, in Western eyes, indications of the inferior status of women in Muslim society and of the inferiority of Islam as a religious and cultural system. Furthermore, Westerners often see it as their duty, whether as mission or strategem, to assist the Muslim woman to liberate herself from these traditional bonds, and especially to remove her veil and educate her.

In the massive contemporary literature that has come to be known as “Islamic economics,”1 the claim is repeatedly made that an Islamic economic system would achieve a greater degree of economic justice than existing capitalist and socialist systems. An Islamic system, it is said, would be free, on the one hand, of the exploitation and severe inequalities that characterize capitalism, and on the other, of the class struggles and intolerable restrictions that are the hallmarks of socialism.2

This article discusses how the Lebanese state has responded to displacement from Syria (2011–17), and how the resulting policy formulation processes and discourses have constructed the relationship between the hosting state and the refugee. It focuses especially on how this small state has negotiated its politics of reception and choice of policy tools amid dysfunctional institutions and political disputes. To this end, it uses the lens of Lebanon's model of sectarian power sharing to understand the polity's response to mass displacement. This process has been structured by the defining dynamics of the country's politics of sectarianism: slack governance, an elite fractured model, and a politics of dependence on external and domestic nonstate actors. The Lebanese model offers broader insights into types of coping mechanisms that emerge in the context of forced migration, notably when a formal refugee regime is absent. The article contends that states lacking a legal asylum framework and grappling with various governance hurdles are likely to draw on the repertoire of their political regime to deal with displacement.

From March until late April 1919 Egypt suffered one of the great peasant revolts of her history and of the 20th century.1 Contemporaries viewed it as having international importance because it was the result of thirty years of European domination, and its resolution would be likely to affect all Western colonial empires.2 For us, it marks the emergence of Egyptian liberalism and the construction of the modern state.3.

The insurrection began when four leaders of the Egyptian national movement were arrested on 9 March 1919. They were then exiled to Malta for insisting that the Egyptian delegation (wafd) to the Versailles Conference be recognized, so that it could demand that Egypt be accepted as an independent national state.

The historiography of Arab nationalism has tended to concentrate on the secular press from the Mashriq, especially the Cairo–Beirut axis, at the expense of the religious nationalist press and the non-Mashriqi one. There is often an assumption that reliance on the secular press from the Mashriq alone can provide a clear picture of Arab intellectual life and that a proper analysis of that thought can be confined to a few intellectual centers in the eastern Arab world. Although there has never been an explicit claim that such a focus is the end of the story, there have not been enough attempts to look beyond the Cairo–Beirut axis and beyond its secular press organs in search of a broader story of the depth and breadth of Arab nationalism. This article addresses this imbalance by examining an Arabist-Salafi press network that operated between Algeria, Tunisia, Zanzibar, and Egypt and involved members of two sectarian communities, Sunnis and Ibadis. This Arabist-Salafi press network created a public sphere of intellectual engagement in which Salafism and nationalism were interwoven, producing a nationalist discourse transgressing post World War I borders of identity and linking the three layers of nationalism—the territorial, the Pan-Arab, and the Pan-Islamic—together. These layers not only intersected but also legitimized one another.

Samad Behrangi (1939–1968), Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad (1923–1969), and ⊂Ali Shari⊂ati (1933–1977) were perhaps the three most influential lay Iranian intellectuals among dissatisfied, anti-regime Iranians during the 1960s and the 1970s. Each hailed from a different province of Iran: Behrangi from Azerbaijan, Āl-e Ahmad from Tehran, and Shari⊂ati from Khorasan. Each developed loyal followings during his lifetime. Each became a “martyr” to his devotees and developed a wider popularity after death than he had enjoyed in his lifetime. And each formulated an extensive societal critique fortifying, inspiring, and galvanizing adherents for the final assault on the shah's regime.

The Declaration of Prsinciples signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993 marked a dramatic about-face in Israel's traditional policy toward the PLO and the Palestinian issue in general. This turn of events came as a surprise not only to journalists and commentators following day-to-day political events, but also to scholars engaged in the academic study of Israeli society. The prevailing notion among these scholars had been that the Israeli polity was suffering from what Horowitz and Lissak (1989) called “overburden” due to domestic debates over the disposition of the occupied territories. Thus, it was concluded, Israel was unable to launch bold policy initiatives to try to solve its deadlocked conflict with the Arabs.

Today, the religion of Islam is most distinctly characterized by the emphasis it places on the transcendence of God.1 God's otherness (mukhālafa), it is said, is presupposed in Islamic thinking from the Qurءan.2 A review of the history of dogmatic development in Islam reveals, however, that during the formative period—that is, the period to about 9503—divine transcendence was only one alternative among several models attempting to explain God's unity. Indeed, it coexisted alongside its antithesis, “assimilation” (tashbīh), or as we term it, anthropomorphism.4 Muslim and Western scholars agree that, although the anthropomorphist model certainly existed—the various heresiographies attest to it—it existed only on the margins of Islam, in the extravagant fancies of a few deviant doctors.5 Thus, anthropomorphist ideas were relevant only marginally, if at all, to Islam's attempt at theological self-definition. Such, at least, is the current scholarly consensus. But how accurate is this reading of Islam's theological history?

The emergence of feminist thought in Egypt at the turn of the last century has often been remarked upon, but there has been little rigorous analysis of its social context and background. As keen an observer as Gabriel Baer has ventured to write that in nineteenth-century Egypt “evidently the traditional structure of the family and the status of women did not undergo any change at all.” On the face of it, however, it seems highly unlikely that the expansion of the urban and rural middle classes, the emergence of private property, the period of state capitalism, and the onset of colonial rule could have left women unaffected.

Shaykh Naʿim al-ʿArqsusi is one of Damascus's most popular Muslim scholars. A leading figure of a local Islamic movement called Jamaʿat Zayd (Zayd's Group), he is widely praised for his knowledge, modesty, and asceticism. Every week, this frail, short-bearded fifty-six-year-old attracts several thousand people to the huge concrete al-Iman mosque next to Baʿth party headquarters in the middle-class neighborhood of al-Mezraʿa.

On a bright day in January 1987, my host in the Awlad ʿAli bedouin community in Egypt in which I had been doing research invited me to accompany him on a con dolence call. He knew how enthusiastic I was about visiting people who stillcamped in traditional tents in the desert, and this set of families, he assured me, lived in a beautiful area. The group's patriarch had died twenty days ago, but my host had been too busy to go so only his younger brothers had paid their respects. He had just heard, though, that the bereaved family was upset he had not come himself. So we drove off in his car, with his two cowives in the back seat, stop ping at the market town nearby to buy a fat sheep to take with us. As they loaded the beast into his car, my host complained about how expensive sheep had be come. The sound of its bleating in the trunk reminded me of trips to weddings, when sheep are also obligatory gifts.

The Middle East was the cradle of the World's three great monotheistic religions, and to this day they continue to play a very important role it its affairs.

This essay is an attempt to reflect on the past and on possible futures of the historiography of Pahlavi Iran. At its root stands the observation that with the rise of the autocratic Pahlavi dynasty, the state began to cast a long shadow over the way journalists, intellectuals, and scholars saw modern Iran. Key actors—Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1921–41) and his bureaucratic elite, and Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–79) and his technocratic elite—produced an image of the state as a unit completely detached from society and omnipotent enough to be the ultimate reference point for all developments be they social, cultural, or economic.

For those who have, or once had it, power holds a strange fascination. For that very reason it waxes men inventive. It is almost invariably surrounded by ideologies of legitimacy, which adduce tradition, divine grace, or the law in order to support the establishment of those at the top. These ideologies are, strictly speaking, instruments of mystification; yet they are permissible weapons as long as they do not prevent the other side from returning them in kind.—Ralf Dahrendorf1